For those who follow politics, you may have come across a pundit named Glenn Beck. He has his own show on Fox News, but begins his show (or at least the one I saw) with a disclaimer that he is not a journalist and thus is not ethically required to be unbiased. Well, that's good, because he isn't. The problem is that he spews the kind of propaganda based on dichotomies that makes people in our country live in fear rather than peace. On his show, Beck showed tape of terrorist bombings around the Middle East and essentially claimed that all Muslims wanted to kill Americans and were training to do so.
For those who have yet to heard my perspective on this whole thing, I hold with those who think that the Middle East conflict is a merely disguised as a religious conflict. It is a cultural conflict, perhaps, and a developmental conflict. These people aren't pissed that we have insulted their religion, we have insulted their way of life. They want to live simply and with certain cultural customs that we don't necessarily share. Conflict? Not yet. The conflict has arisen when we decide not to respect the sovereignty of those customs. We try to push our ideas down their throats by installing Western business styles and governments. Oh, and then there's Israel, which the West placed on the Western end of the Middle East, in the middle of an area full of people that notoriously clash with Jews. This is not about religion, it is about respect for a people's personal space.
So back to Beck. I was in Borders yesterday and I saw a book entitled "An Inconvenient Book." Weird, sounds like "An Inconvenient Truth," I wonder who wrote it and what it's about. Well, it was written by Beck. I am tempted to buy it and see what kinds of "facts" he throws in there, because the intro claims the book to be full of them. However it gives us a teaser fact, which is that there is more CO2 in the air now than there has ever been, and people are living longer than they ever have, so it must not be having a negative effect! Holy Shit! Mr. Beck, just because two facts exist at the same time doesn't mean one causes the other. Maybe people live longer because we are incubated against disease by the drugs that we create, our houses that spew air conditioning, our ultra-safe cars, etc.? Maybe? All of these things keep us safe, but also cause some amount of pollution to the environment.
How about these two facts? There are 100's of millions of cell phones in the United States, and AIDS affects millions of Africans. As one goes up, the other goes up. Are they related? Yes. Does one cause the other, or do they share a common cause? No. Millions of Americans want to keep up with the communication revolution associated with the Flat World, and Africans contract disease because of poor health care. Not a close causal relationship there. (You could find one, possibly in the exploitation of third world labor, particularly for a certain element of cell phones only found in Africa and the effect of that exploitation on African health care, but it's a stretch. Though not as much of a stretch as Beck's.)
Here's the point: Don't listen to people on the news, or at least take what they say with a grain of salt and be wary of statistics (even ones you agree with).
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